Insurance Choice And The Demand For Prescription Drugs Among Individuals With Chronic Conditions

<p>This study explores insurance choice of the chronically ill non-elderly adults and their utilization and expenditures on prescription drugs. Discrete factor model is used to estimate an individual's probability of any drug use and the conditional level of utilization and associated out-of-pocket expenditures. Analyses on four subpopulation groups, i.e. hypertension, diabetes, asthma and depression, provide detailed insights into individuals' health insurance decision making and subsequent prescription drug filling behavior, given their health insurance status. The results indicate that only a few health risk factors are statistically significant in determining an individual's health insurance status, and that the direction of the effects are mixed, implying no definite pattern of self-selection. Meanwhile, most health characteristic variables are strongly related to overall use of prescription drugs. The association between health insurance and prescription drug utilization and expenditures differs by condition. The greatest one is evident among individuals with depression or hypertension, while the weakest is among individuals with asthma. These findings have important implication for policy makers and plan designers in evaluating the affordability of the combination of drugs, assessing individuals' financial burden of drug treatment and rationalizing drug formulary decisions, to ultimately improve population health outcomes.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Year dc:date.available

2013

Author dc:creator

• Feng, Chunyang

Contributors dc:contributor

• Allen C. Goodman

• chronic conditions
• insurance
• prescription drugs
• Economics

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/836

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.wayne.edu:oa_dissertations-1835